A lost world has been found in Antarctica, preserved just the way it was when it was frozen in time some 14 million years ago.

The fossils of plants and animals high in the mountains is an extremely
rare find in the continent, one that also gives a glimpse of a what
could be there in a century or two as the planet warms.

A team working in an ice-free region has discovered
the trove of ancient life in what must have been the last traces of
tundra on the interior of the southernmost continent before
temperatures began to drop relentlessly.

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An abrupt and
dramatic climate cooling of 8°C in 200,000 years forced the extinction
of tundra plants and insects and brought interior Antarctica into a
perpetual deep-freeze from which it has never emerged, though may do
again as a result of climate change.

An
international team led by Prof David Marchant, at Boston University and
Profs Allan Ashworth and Adam Lewis, at North Dakota State University,
combined evidence from glaciers, from the preserved ecology, volcanic
ashes and modelling to reveal the full extent of the big freeze in a
part of Antarctica called the Dry Valleys.

The new
insight in the understanding of Antarctica's climatic history, which
saw it change from a climate like that of South Georgia to one similar
to that seen today in Mars, is published in the Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences.